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Right to work?

Michigan seems on the verge of passing right to work.

So, what is right to work? Necessary to preserve individual liberty? An immoral restraint on employers' right to require employees to join unions? A reasonable counterbalance to federal laws that unreasonably favor unions?

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I can't imagine an employer wanting a unionized workplace. Did you misstate your sentence?

Unionism is extortion written into law. It violates market principals and simply uses the threat of violence (physical or economic) to garner an above average wage and benefits package for union members that the rest of the non union country has to pay for.

If everyone in the US were unionized, there would be no benefit to a union as all salaries and benefits would be homogenized again to market levels only with the union taking a cut for doing nothing.

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There is data to suggest that regulation actually benefits some employers in that it provides a higher barrier to entry as well as removing some liability uncertainty. Thus employers/manufacturers exchange some freedom in exchange for some safety, and this tradeoff is the essence why of society and civilizations are formed. By passing the burden of "liability definitions" to a government agency, a manufacturer changes the target from product safety, which is a very nebulous thing, to compliance with government regulations, which is a very defined thing.

Similarly, by accepting a unionized workplace, an employer/manufacturer gives up some profit margin and accepts a less effective or motivated work force in exchange for a stable workplace which can at least exist for periods of time without threat of strikes. All an employer needs to do to "prove" concern for workers is to point to their interaction with unions.

But,just as you mention, to understand it in this way is also to understand that unions hold the structure of production hostage in a way that business owners cannot, in that business owners are constrained to voluntary interactions with the rest of society, in that if they provide a product and jobs that the rest of society freely chooses, they prosper, and this balance is what creates a healthy society. Unions, on the other hand, operate on the same principle as organized crime, and thus they help to foster an unhealthy society. One of my fondest memories of Reagan was his firing of the air traffic controllers. Standing up to unions for business owners is like removing man eating lions -- dangerous, but good for society.

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When a union becomes the lesser of two evils, or when it can be used to stifle competition as a consequence of the legal system, then I'd say there's something seriously wrong with that legal system.

My father was a union member. I was a union member briefly while going to college. I worked for the breweries in New York. A classmate's father was big shot with the union so I got a "shapeup" job during the summer months. Pay at the time (1968-72) was $5.58/hr. Got paid for 8 hours and only worked 6. Some union rule provided 2 hours for lunch and coffee (beer) breaks.

I knew something wasn't right when the production line stopped one day due to some break down and being bored I picked up a broom and started sweeping up the broken bottle glass in my area. In nothing flat a union shop steward was all over me. I was taking the food out of another man's mouth according to him. I almost got fired for cleanliness.

I also noted the guy operating the elevator at the Schaefer brewery in Brooklyn. The building only had 2 floors and the huge freight elevator was maned full time by the union member with the highest seniority. There was only 1 button. When pressed on the first floor it would go up to the second. When pressed from the second floor it would descent to the first. This union employee was the only person allowed to press the button. I have no idea how he managed such a stressful job.

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... blah blah blah, unions or no unions; I find that the idea of having a right to work appealing, especially in light of the tremendous (fairly recently record) cash piles companies appear to have stashed away, plus their proclivity over that last 1 - 2 decades to hire many workers in other countries and not repatriating their earnings from overseas (that would mean "paying taxes in the US!"), which we would desperately need to offset our annual $ 1 Trillion plus additional deficits adding to the by-now accumulated $ 16 Trillion total national deficit. Workers would get an income, shop, get the economy going. Appears to be the right recipe to me.

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No person or government has any right to interfere in any voluntary association or exchange of values ever. A moral government may neither mandate particular associations between or among employers and employees nor forbid them. Regulations resulting from right to work legislation are as immoral as those of the NLRA.

Example to consider: If a union president who believes in the benefits of a union shop retires from his position and starts a small business, it would be a violation of his individual rights to forbid him from agreeing to a union shop contract with his employees that required union membership for every new employee hired and forbade secret ballots in all union elections.

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If you're a union member, you still recieve the benefit of representation of collective bargaining but now they don't have their hand in your pocket. There will still be enough money to pay for the negotiators, just not their political agenda and since 40% of union members are Republican.

There is also a part of me that is smiling because all the Democrats are all smug over their landslide victory a month ago and this drives a dagger in the heart of the liberal agenda at ground zero. I'm happy to live in a right to work state, it helped me quite a bit when I wanted to leave a large company and start my own business.

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The only thing this law does is it prevents unions from collecting dues from non-members. It doesn't prevent unions from forming, and it doesn't stop collective bargaining. It just prevents unions from conducting legally sanctioned theft of money that people would not otherwise give them.

In theory, part of your dues money is supposed to pay lobbyists to influence legislators to pass laws to create safer working conditions and prevent worker abuse. But, like many "nice theories", it's a different story when put into practice.

In reality, unions conduct legal bribery. They help re-elect corrupt politicians in exchange for rent-seeking laws that favor unions over both the interests of employers and ultimately, employees (see bankrupt Detroit for an example). After all, they have to do something with all that money now that much of the safety and abuse lobbying has has become redundant (since we have OSHA and other government agencies doing it for them).

This is particularly galling for the 40% of union members (myself included) who would be happy to never have a Democrat elected again.

My shop recently voted to become union, so how do they protect the workers? Despite having a decade on the job before the union got here, the union has threatened, via certified mail, to have me terminated if I don't give them immediate authorization to deduct their dues from my paycheck. Read that again. My union is threatening to have me fired if they don't get their money. I think that illustrates pretty clearly the true motivation of a union is not about protecting employees but to collect money from them.

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Your first sentence confused me. How can a union expect to collect dues from a non member?

Since your shop decided to become unionized, are you FORCED to become a union member in your state? If you refuse, what happens? If you get fired, doesn't the labor law offer you some protection from this?

Your post left me with a worse impression of a union than I previously had. Although I don't believe anyone can convert me to favoring a union, I don't want to have the wrong impression of how they operate. Please elaborate for educational purposes.

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"Since your shop decided to become unionized, are you FORCED to become a union member in your state? If you refuse, what happens? If you get fired, doesn't the labor law offer you some protection from this?"

Yes, that's how it works in non RTW states. Federal labor laws explicitly give unions that power, and RTW is a state level fix that alleviates some of the burden on workers who don't want to join.

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That's how collective bargaining states work. Once a union has voted to institute a "union shop", it means that forever after all workers must contribute to the union in some way, regardless if they are union members or not. I was employed at Wayne State University in Detroit for a short time. They instituted a teachers union prior to my hire, even though a minority of the faculty voted for it. After that time, once you became faculty, you were forced to contribute.

You could either join the union and have the dues taken out of your paycheck, or you could choose to not join the union and have a larger amount than the union dues taken out and contributed to a needy student fund. Being profoundly anti-union and appalled at the forcible nature of the whole thing, I declined to join the union and elected to pay the larger amount just to make a statement. I subsequently realized that refusing to join the union was not something that polite teachers do, as I was called by the union rep no less than 3 times and had the benefits of unions described to me in detail. Apparently out of the whole university I was only one of a handful of teachers who took a stand against institutionalized thuggery. It was sad.

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Laws have grossly distorted our labor markets. Right to work is very much at odds with individual liberty as union protectionism is. In this sense, this interferes with the right of the employer to attach union membership as a term of employment. Thus, right to work laws violate the ownership rights of employers.

Without the distortive laws from up high, unions would have to offer a benefit to the employer to convince that employer to do business with them. For instance, if the union performed training efforts or screened employees for the necessary skill levels that the employer is seeking, then the union would be providing a benefit to the employer. Union members enjoy the collective bargaining, employers enjoy a higher quality employee and expends fewer resources recruiting.

The reason unions get a bad rap is due to their history as government sponsored entities - first through the medieval guild system and today through this invented "right" of unions over the factors of production that a business and risk-takers own. Remove all the laws and let the market balance itself out. Passing right to work to make up for the foolishness of FDR and forward is the wrong path to take.

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Collective Bargaining is a legal concept, so it has the force of law behind it, like it or not. I don't think you can use the term in any manner that disassociates it from the law.

If a group of people collectively went to a store and demanded something, the store owner could simply tell them to go to blazes if he didn't agree. Without legal enforcement, if a group of employees collectively went to management and demanded something, management could simply tell them to go to blazes if they didn't agree. The employees could either quit or not, as is their choice, and the employer could either fire them or not as would be his choice.

That's what seems fair to me. Both sides with a bargaining position and both sides with options negotiating a matter. Neither side with an advantage over the other.

Collective bargaining as written into law is an evil that needs to be excised.

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"Collective Bargaining is a legal concept, so it has the force of law behind it, like it or not."

No it's not. Collective bargaining has been around for far longer than any laws that force it onto people. When a group of people in my office went to the owner of the gym in the building and got a group rate, that was collective bargaining. The force of law was not involved.

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In the 80s, I as a self-employed engineer/consultant could join with other's like me through an aggregator to get group rates for health insurance. The force of law was not involved.

Then, a group of slugs went to Congress and bought legislation makiing it illegal for the self-employed to do that. The force of law was suddenly involved.

Now, as part of the forced association called 'ObamaCare'... a new law wants to force my association to another variant of what used to be perfectly legal without any force of law...

Free association vs. forced association; America needs to start using that illuminating light to recognize a state out of all control. The proper role of government in a free nation is as traffic cop, enforcer against forced associations of all manner, expecially by itself.

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Collective bargaining itself is not evil. What makes it evil is when it is ensconced into law. That starts a natural cycle of corruption which grows worse over time, such as the symbiotic relationship between unions and Democrat politicians. The root of the problem comes from recognizing it with legal protection and status and making it a "legal concept".

Fortunately, the market corrects mistakes over time, which is why Detroit is nearly failed, and Hostess definitely so. Unfortunately, public-sector unions are nearly immune from the normal corrective mechanisms, so when they finally fail, it is spectacularly bad.